Category: Mobile Device ID Targeting

Real-Life Mobile Device ID Examples (Part 4 of a 4 Part Series)

Posted on March 23, 2020

The third section in this 4-part series on Mobile Device ID advertising focused on where your advertisements can run using this cell phone tracking technology. This fourth part provides real-world examples of Digital Record clients utilizing Mobile ID advertising in two totally different categories. The first is a restaurant group that used mobile ID targeting to promote their brunch offerings. The second is a large-scale haunted house attraction using mobile IDs to promote their Halloween event.

Advertising for Brunch

Our first example of the targeted and successful use of mobile ID technology in advertising is for a group of Mexican restaurants we work with that needed help promoting brunch. These restaurants are in downtown areas and rely heavily on tourists, hotel business, and frequent brunch-goers. Everyone is not a target for their brunch offerings, and budgets are not huge, so we needed to just target the people most likely to go to brunch and most likely to visit now. We used the following targets and tactics:

Targets

  1. We identified people that had visited other restaurants during brunch within a 3-mile radius of our locations, as well as a few additional brunch locations in town with similar audiences. We did this by gathering the mobile IDs that visited a specific list of restaurants on Saturday or Sunday from 9am-2pm, and pulled those IDs over the previous 6-month period. This gives us the people most likely to visit for brunch in this geographic area.
  2. We also identified the phones at hotels in the area of the restaurant, and at the convention center downtown. These are phones in that area within the day or so before weekend brunch. 

Advertising Tactics

  1. We targeted the users that had visited brunch in that area, running ads within a 10-mile radius of the restaurants using display ads in-app on the phones identified, with ads airing Thursday through noon on Sunday. This ran on most of the phones we identified, especially the ones most recently counted.
  2. We cross-referenced this mobile ID list to Facebook and Instagram, running video ads in the feeds to these users. This identified users in the 40% to 50% range of those phones captured.
  3. We ran in-app display ads to the targets identified as being currently at the hotels or convention center in the area, running ads to their phones while they were within a 3-mile radius of the restaurant. 

Results. We have been able to highly target audiences at very low budgets using mobile ID for restaurants. This has allowed us to run display ads under $10 CPM and video in the $12 to $15 range, hyper-targeting our digital media campaigns with small budgets. This wasn’t the only tactic we used to promote brunch, but was the most efficient.

Advertising for Haunted Houses

Our agency works with quite a few large-scale haunted houses for their Halloween promotions and throughout the year, working with agency Fearworm Hauntvertising, but will focus this case study on one haunt attraction located in Texas. Haunted attractions don’t target everyone…it is a young, specific audience that most wants to visit these events. Also, budgets are typically very limited, so targeting is extremely important. Here are the targets and tactics we used:

Targets

  1. We identified people that had visited our haunted house as well as the other haunted houses in that market in the last 365 days.
  2. We identified audiences that visited other events similar to a haunted house audience, such as escape rooms.
  3. We identified people that attended large-scale events in the past year with an audience similar to our haunted house crowd, including Comicon’s, Horror events, and concerts such as Slipknot, Rob Zombie or Marilyn Manson.
  4. We identified phones of students at the high schools in the local area.

Advertising Tactics

  1. We rolled this entire group together and ran ads to all of them in the DMA throughout the haunt season with in-app display ads on the phones identified.
  2. We cross-referenced this mobile ID list to Facebook and Instagram, running video ads in the feeds to these users. This identified 40% to 50% of those users and allowed us to reach them with video.
  3. We also identified these mobile IDs in our programmatic channels and were able to run pre-roll video and OTT video to this audience.
  4. We also created lookalike audiences to our mobile IDs (second-party data) and ran ads to this group on Facebook and Instagram as well as across programmatic media.

Results. A key point is the fact that we were creating our own first-party data and a second-party data audience (lookalike audience). We were able to access this audience and build audiences from it to use on mobile phones, in social media, in digital video, and across the internet. Costs for ads were no different than if we just used third-party targeting data. By building these audiences, we are building our own first-party database that has become a huge value to this haunt.

This concludes our 4-part series on the use of Mobile Device IDs in advertising. This is a precisely targeted way to reach people with ads that are relevant to them and provide huge value for our or your customers at a low price. If you’d like to learn more about mobile ID targeting, please contact Digital Record at ernest@digitalrecordagency.com. 

Where Do Mobile Device ID Ads Run? (Part 3 of a 4-Part Series)

Posted on October 31, 2019

The second part of this series on Mobile Device ID advertising focused on the basis of this advertising technology. This third article explains where your advertising runs using Mobile IDs.

So, We’ve Identified a Group of Mobile IDs…

That’s the first step – finding cell phones based on where they have physically visited, categorizing them, finding where they are located now, and hopefully building lists of these IDs for future campaigns. We know the phones we want to target, now how do we get ads to those phones, and through what channels do we advertise?

Where Do Mobile ID Ads Run?

The first and easiest place to run ads on these phones is within the App environment, as that’s where we identified the phones in the first place. Because we know the phone ID we want to reach, we can programmatically purchase display ads within apps – games, sports, lifestyle, tools – wherever ads are found. Ads could run on the app through which a phone was identified, or thousands of additional apps. We mostly run display ads in apps, as there are many more opportunities with display. However, in-app video can also run, especially if you have a broad target audience or large geographic target area. 

Ads can be targeted to a specific geography, say a DMA, or by zip code. So even if we’ve pulled the Mobile IDs from across the country, we only run ads to the phones that are within our specified advertising target area for each campaign. The larger the geographic area, the more phones we are likely to reach. Ads can run by day, by hour or daypart. 

Note that you won’t reach every ID you gather, because everyone doesn’t use apps all the time. They also might not currently be within that geographic area, or not using apps that allow advertising. But this in-app environment is typically our first target because it’s the place we identify the most phones.

Cross-Platform Mobile ID Advertising


Cross-platform advertising is the process of taking the list of Mobile IDs we’ve identified and cross-referencing this list to other platforms, including social outlets. This allows us to run ads where people spend the majority of their time – on Facebook and Instagram. We can also use a Mobile ID list in programmatic advertising. Cross-platform usage is extremely important for several reasons:

  1. It gets us out of the app environment. People spend more time on social platforms, they are more engaged with the advertising and more likely to see your message. It also allows us to run larger ads including more text and content (i.e. a carousel ad with multiple images, and multiple link points). It just works better than in-app ads.

  2. It allows us to successfully introduce video, which works great on Facebook and Instagram. In the programmatic world, OTT Video is becoming extremely important. In fact, we feel by 2021 it will officially be the “new TV.” Mobile ID targets can be successfully reached using video by cross-referencing these phones to social identities, but also by utilizing OTT video. It’s like running a TV campaign only to a very specific audience of first-party participants you choose…amazing.

Challenges

When you run a campaign to a Mobile ID target list you won’t reach everyone. Every phone is not identified. The smaller the geographic area you advertise to, the fewer people you’ll reach. Everyone doesn’t use apps every day. And every social profile won’t be identified. The list also degrades in value over time. So, our warning is, although it sounds like this is the “Holy Grail” of advertising, it is really just part of a successful advertising campaign. You will find a premium target audience through Mobile ID targeting, but it’s far from everyone you need to target. A multi-faceted campaign always works best. 

Keep in touch with Digital Record to read Part 4 of this 4-part series, “Real Life Mobile Device ID Examples,” coming soon. Follow Digital Record now.

How Mobile Device ID Targeting Works. (Part 2 of a 4-Part Series)

Posted on September 19, 2019

The first part of our series on Mobile Device ID Targeting attempted to describe something that can be difficult to understand – What the technology is, how mobile ID targeting allows us to time travel, and why this form of digital audience targeting can be so successful. But how does this technology work? 

What is my Mobile Device ID and Who Gave Permission to Follow It?

A mobile ID is not a phone number. It is the number that allows your cell phone to travel between cell towers without dropping a call. It allows your phone to be tracked from location to location.

If you wonder why you’re being followed, it is simple: you gave an app on your phone permission to track where you are so that it can better provide its service. Accuweather, Wayze…any sort of map or weather or news app…they all want to track your location so they can provide you directions or a forecast or local news. Even if you’ve turned off tracking permissions on your phone, if you’ve allowed one of these apps to know your GPS location then you are being tracked. These apps share this data, and sell the data to providers. So, although we don’t know who a phone belongs to, we do know where that phone has been. We can also identify other devices or platforms to which that phone is connected.

How Do We Get This Information?

Apps sell this information to data providers, and the data providers make that data available for purchase. Again, your anonymity is still intact. We are not able to see data inside your phone or learn your identity through this information at Digital Record. We don’t even know your phone number. But we do know where your phone has been, so this builds first-party data we can use for marketing. As a digital media agency, we pick the locations, dates and times for which we want to identify the cell phones that were in that location, then build the list. 

How Long Do These Lists Last?

We can use a mobile ID list as long as we feel it remains relevant. However, the further back in time you travel, the more the list of phones will degrade in quality. So, it really depends upon how tight your audience is. We will go back in time over a year to target a specific event, but if we’re just looking for, say, restaurant-goers, any more than a couple of months is probably too far out.

Another Key to Success

We don’t actually pay to purchase these audiences until we use them in advertising. We build audiences for future use, then run ads using the audience as a target and pay a CPM fee for the use. We are constantly building audiences without a fee and pay only for what we use.

Stay in touch to reach part 3 of this 4-part series, “Where Do Mobile Device ID Ads Run?”. Follow Digital Record now.

What is Mobile Device ID Targeting? (Part 1 of a 4-Part Series)

Posted on September 9, 2019

Mobile Device ID Targeting is old-world meets new-world marketing. Do you remember how years ago when you went to an event, then came out to your car afterward, there was a flyer under your windshield wiper? That is what Mobile ID Targeting is in the digital age…reaching an audience based on a location or event they attend to advertise for a similar event or target-audience…but these days we do it by identifying their mobile device (Smartphone). Contextual targeting is when you run ads on a web site (i.e. Ad Age) to target people interested in that content (advertising information). Mobile targeting reaches a real-world audience based on locations or events they visit, because you know that contextually, if they’ve visited this business then they must be interested in your business. Mobile Device ID Targeting creates a first-party data audience based on cell phone tracking information.

The Technology

Mobile ID uses GPS targeting, creating a GPS geofence around the coordinates of a building or facility or parking lot or whatever area you want to reach, targeting down to precise GPS targets within 14 feet. Once you identify the area you want to target, we can then identify the phones that enter that location at a specific date and time.

Our goal is to capture the phone “ID’s” that enter into that area. A phone ID is not the phone number, but rather a number the phone uses to be identified for its location so that it can travel between cell towers without dropping a call. It is also the number used to track your location for apps and maps. We are able to identify the phones within a given geofence by the day and time it is there. This is the same technology the FBI uses to track criminals!

Time Travel is Real

We can capture IDs in real time, but more importantly, we can go back in time and gather the phones that have visited a location within a specific time frame. We pick the day and time at a location, then identify the phones that were within that geofence at that time. For example, if there was a concert a month ago at a stadium, we can identify the phones at that stadium on the day and time of the concert, capturing the audience that attended the concert. This means when we’re planning a campaign, we can pick the events that have happened in the past that are relevant to our target audience, go back in time and identify the people that went to that event, then advertise to those same phones in the future.

The Key to Success

Mobile ID targeting is so important because we are able to create a first-party audience by capturing smartphone data. We can then target this audience through display ads within the apps on their phone. We can also use this audience to target them on Facebook, Instagram, or with programmatic media using display ads, pre-roll video or even OTT Video, the “New TV.” 

Stay in touch to reach part 2 of this 4-part series, “How Mobile Device ID Targeting Works,” coming 9/16/19. Follow us now.